You do it because you have to

There comes a point in every ascent when you realize not everyone is meant to rise with you. It is not cruelty. It is not abandonment. It is simply the truth of altitude: some people cannot breathe where you are going. Some people cannot tolerate the clarity you’ve earned. Some people cannot follow you into a life that no longer requires your disappearance.

You don’t notice it at first. You assume the people who loved you in your smallness will love you in your expansion. You assume the ones who praised your resilience will celebrate your boundaries. You assume the ones who leaned on your strength will respect the cost of it. But altitude exposes the fault lines. It reveals who was drawn to your light and who was drawn to your dimming. It shows you who loved you and who loved the version of you that made their life easier.

The ones who cannot follow begin to pull away the moment you stop performing the role they assigned you. They call your clarity “cold.” They call your boundaries “selfish.” They call your distance “ungrateful.” They miss the version of you who bent. They miss the version of you who absorbed impact without complaint. They miss the version of you who mistook endurance for devotion. They miss the version of you who made their comfort your responsibility.

You watch them from your new vantage point, not with bitterness but with recognition. You see the limits of their capacity. You see the architecture of their expectations. You see the ways they relied on your silence to maintain their own stability. You see how your growth threatens the equilibrium they built on your compliance. You see that their inability to follow has nothing to do with your worth and everything to do with their own unexamined gravity.

There is grief in this.

Not the dramatic kind—

the quiet ache of realizing that some relationships were never built to withstand your becoming.

You mourn the imagined versions of them, the ones who might have walked beside you if they had been willing to rise. You mourn the ease of old patterns, even when those patterns cost you pieces of yourself. You mourn the comfort of familiarity, even when that familiarity was built on your own erasure.

But grief is not a summons to return.

It is simply the echo of what you are releasing.

The ones who cannot follow will try to pull you back, not out of malice but out of fear. They will remind you of who you used to be. They will try to anchor you in old narratives. They will insist that your transformation is a threat rather than a truth. They will ask you to shrink so they don’t have to stretch. They will ask you to descend so they don’t have to rise.

You do not descend.

You do not fold yourself back into the shape that once made them comfortable.

You do not trade your altitude for their approval.

You do not sacrifice your clarity to soothe their insecurity.

You do not apologize for the distance required to protect your becoming.

You simply keep moving.

Not away in anger, but forward in alignment.

Not to punish them, but to honor yourself.

Not because you stopped caring, but because you finally started caring in the right direction.

The ones who cannot follow will fall away naturally, like leaves that cannot survive the new season. You do not chase them. You do not explain yourself to them. You do not contort yourself to make the loss easier. You let them go with the same steadiness you used to hold yourself together.

Because the truth is simple:

anyone who cannot breathe at your altitude was never meant to shape your sky.

And the ones who can follow—the ones who can meet you in your clarity, your boundaries, your truth—will not require your shrinking. They will not fear your expansion. They will not mistake your selfhood for rejection. They will rise beside you without asking you to dim.

But this chapter is not about them.

This chapter is about the release.

The necessary shedding.

The quiet, unsentimental truth that not everyone is meant to stay.

You rise anyway.